ONE PIECE like no one has seen before

The first print run of the new manga sold more than three million copies, and the total number of books published worldwide currently exceeds 510 million volumes (as of April 2024). The series we are referring to is, of course, ONE PIECE. The exhibition ONE PIECE ONLY allows visitors to view a “never seen before” aspect of the manga series, which is in the Guinness World Records as the manga with the largest circulation in the world. Chapter 1 to Chapter 1,110 are extracted from the manga volumes and displayed like a continuous scroll. Behind-the-scenes of the production of Weekly Shonen Jump and Jump Comics were captured with a 8K high-speed camera and screened using three 8K projectors. To commemorate 100 Jump manga volumes and 1,000 serialized chapters, color proofs, printing plates are displayed alongside original artwork by Eiichiro Oda. Every fan reads this manga, but how is it actually made? Even the staff involved in the production has never seen anything like in such a vast space. It is an unprecedented, unexplored, unknown, and truly extraordinary project.

This catalogue, which accompanies the exhibition, is made up of five sections, each marked with a number.

“0 → 364mm × 257mm”; “364mm × 257mm → 257mm × 182 mm”; “257mm × 182mm → 176mm × 112mm”; “364mm × 257mm → 364mm × 257mm”; “3.6m × 140m”

The meaning of each of the set of numbers is as follows.

0 → 364mm × 257mm (from p. 2)

From nothing to the start of a new story. Panels and rough sketches come to life on a white blank sheet of paper as the dialogue of the characters is gradually filled in. Then the story is drawn on B4-sized (364mm x 257mm) manuscript paper, and the inking, solid coloring, and finishing touches such as applying screentone completes the artwork. Creating the story and bringing the characters to life with ink is done all by one artist. The manga is produced at a pace of about a dozen pages per week. The catalogue features Eiichiro Oda’s workspace, storyboards (including panel layouts, rough sketches of characters and backgrounds, and dialogue), and original artwork. Close-up photography was taken with a macro lens, aiming to capture the momentum of the pencil lines running on paper, the touch of pen strokes, and the nuances of applying solid black and screentone to the page. The sole source of this creation is Eiichiro Oda.

364mm × 257mm → 257mm × 182mm (from p. 70)

The B5-sized (257mm ×182 mm) Weekly Shonen Jump is produced using the original artwork drawn on B4-sized (364mm × 257mm) paper. The primary sites of production are in Shueisha (Jinbocho, Tokyo, p. 72), in the Kyodo Printing Headquarters (Koishikawa, Tokyo, p. 82), and in the Kyodo Printing Goka Plant (Ibaraki Prefecture, p. 92). The catalog includes aerial photographs of these sites taken by well-known photographer Naoki Honjo.

The editor receives the original artwork and submits it to the printing company. The original artwork is then scanned with a commercial scanner and converted into a monochrome two-tone digital image. Before the original artwork is completed, the editor provides the text and dialogue specifications to the printing company and submits them in advance. These elements are combined on a computer, and a table of contents, title, and lead, etc. are added to create the pages that will be published in the magazine.

In 2021, when the 1,000th chapter of ONE PIECE was produced, the plate making and typesetting processes were carried out in the former Kyodo Printing headquarters. The completed data is burned onto transparent plate making film, which is then employed to create a yellow resin printing plate. Because resin plates gradually ware out, printing large runs of Weekly Shonen Jump required multiple resin plates, which were sent almost daily from Tokyo to their factory in Ibaraki Prefecture. As of 2024, this process has been improved upon, and the completed plate
making data is now sent over the network to Kyodo Printing’s Goka Plant in Ibaraki Prefecture. A CTP (Computer To Plate) flow is used to make printing plates directly from data. The material of the printing plates has also shifted to milky-white plates. The plate making film and yellow resin plates on display are valuable documents that showcase the technology that has long supported the printing of manga magazines.

While many magazines are currently produced using offset printing, Weekly Shonen Jump, which has a circulation of over 1 million copies, continues to be printed using a rotary letterpress. The production process is carried out at Kyodo Printing’s Goka Plant in Ibaraki Prefecture. Using rolls of paper with a diameter of 100 cm, width of 107 cm, and weight of 450 kg, it prints more than 1.5 million pages per hour. One roll of paper is used up every 12 to 13 minutes. The printed sheets are automatically folded and sent on to the binding process. They are then bound together with offset-printed color covers and frontispieces, loaded onto pallets by robots, automatically shrink-wrapped, and then delivered to trucks.

For the ONE PIECE ONLY exhibition, the printing and binding processes of Weekly Shonen Jump were filmed in September 2024. A high-magnification anamorphic lens was used. The filming was done with a 6K high-speed camera, recording the movement of the machines, and the flow of paper that cannot be captured by the human eye.

The catalogue includes photographs of typesetting specification sheets (p. 74–77), proof sheets (p. 78–81), plate making films (p. 84–87), resin plates (p. 88–91), and the printing and binding processes (p. 94–101) for Weekly Shonen Jump.

257mm × 182mm → 176mm × 112mm (from p. 106)

A new pocket-sized paperback Jump Comics edition (176mm × 112mm) is being created from the B5-sized (257mm × 182mm) Weekly Shonen Jump. Eiichiro Oda created the cover illustration for this book. The illustration is taken from ONE PIECE’s 100th volume, an important part of a series linking the 99th and the 101st volumes. Strategically, volume 99 features Big Mom, volume 100 features Luffy, and volume 101 features Kaido. To create vividly colored works using colored markers and colored pencils, and to create a cover that resonates with the readers, its production was carried out in close collaboration from editing to design, plate making, printing, and surface treatment.

The cover plate and its printing were entrusted to Bishodo (Itabashi-ku, Tokyo / p. 130). Conventional commercial printing uses four colors, namely CMYK (cyan=light blue, magenta=reddish purple, yellow, and black). Tankobon covers are often printed in five colors, with fluorescent pink added n to produce the color of the characters’ skin tone. The 100th volume of ONE PIECE has an initial print run of over 3 million copies. Even among those in the publishing industry, few people will notice that the cover is printed in seven colors. In addition to CMYK and fluorescent pink, fluorescent blue and fluorescent yellow are used. The design, plate making, and printing were carried out using these many colors in the hope that the result will be vivid, vibrant, and uplifting for the viewer. The covers of other volumes of ONE PIECE have also been printed using multiple fluorescent inks, but color samples using combinations of fluorescent inks were made independently to be used as a reference for this volume’s special printing design. Several cover design drafts were produced, and the one chosen by the artist is then further refined, with numerous color proofs tested and adjusted before final approval. To account for the color changes that occur when Gloss PP film is applied, the film is applied during a test to ensure the final colors are accurate. Only then is the approved final version allowed to be printed.

To produce the monochrome pages known as honmon (main text), data for Jump Comics is created based on the plate making data of Weekly Shonen Jump. The size of the magazine is B5 (257mm × 182mm). The size of the Jump Comics volume is smaller or shinsho (176mm × 112mm). Since the aspect ratio of the finished size of the book is different from the magazine, the positioning of the manga artwork at the top, bottom, and edges changes. In addition, the gutter (the inner margins of the book) at the time of bookbinding is also considered during the layout process. In addition, typographical errors and omissions that could not be corrected in the weekly series schedule are corrected, and the positioning of the text within the speech bubbles is adjusted to the millimeters. The placement of line breaks also is revised to help make the text easier to read. A table of contents, columns, reader pages, and colophons, etc. are added, and the content is carefully crafted to enhance the book’s overall appeal. The finalized data is then sent from the Kyodo Printing Group to Chuo Seihan Printing, which carried out the printing of the text and bookbinding.

Chuo Seihan Printing Building No. 2 (Toda City, Saitama Prefecture / p. 130) is responsible for printing and binding. Since the release of Volume 57 in 2010, the initial print run of every ONE PIECE volume has consistently exceeded 3 million copies. To produce this number of copies, a machine that performs all processes from printing to binding, commonly known as an integrated machine, is used.

In conventional printing and binding, one-fold = 32 pages, which are then bound together. However, the integrated machine can produce two copies of a 192-page book at one go – 384 pages in total. The printed paper is automatically folded onto a reel measuring 95 cm wide by approximately 6500 m long, and weighing 345 kg, and comes out on a conveyer belt folded in a long, thin shape with the same images connected above and below (called double binding). The top and bottom images are then cut and separated, and the cover, obi (belt or thin book wrap) and new release information are attached before the volumes are stacked on a pallet. It operates 24-hour-a-day with three shifts. Over one million copies are produced within a week, and over 3 million copies are in about three weeks. Each and every book becomes unique and valuable to its reader.

The catalogue includes the cover illustration for Volume 100 (p. 114), cover color proofs (from p. 118), cover printing plates (from p. 112), scenes from the printing and binding of the Jump Comics volume (from p. 140), and samples of double binding for the Jump Comics editions (p. 142).

364mm × 257mm → 364mm × 257mm (from p. 146)

The ONE PIECE Only exhibition has been planned and curated by Shueisha Manga-Art Heritage (SMAH). After the launch of the SMAH project website in March 2021 with a mission of “transforming manga into art worthy of being passed down,” we began producing art prints of select manga works. The artwork is sold world-wide. In addition to selling prints, we collaborate with museums to preserve and archive original artworks. This involves traditional techniques like letterpress flatbed printing, collotype printing, and the use of handmade Japanese paper, with all production processes recorded on video.

One aspect of the project featured an artwork for which we revived the use of metal type and zinc plates for manga production, a method used before phototypesetting came into general use. This work is titled ONE PIECE / Regenesis (2023), was produced at the Kazui Press, a letterpress printing studio that has been in operation since before the war. The photo on page 148 is an aerial view of the old company building.

Since 2021, SMAH has been producing a series of monochrome print works titled “The Press” using flatbed letterpress printing. The monochrome manuscripts, which are usually reduced from B4 to B5 for printing, have been turned into works at the original B4 size (364mm × 257mm → 364mm × 257mm). At the ONE PIECE ONLY exhibition, over a hundred such works will be on display, including the Real Color Collection, a series of color prints produced using archival inkjet printing, and ONE PIECE / The Scroll, a collotype work printed on Echizen washi paper.

3.6m × 140m (from p. 146)

The ONE PIECE ONLY exhibition will feature Chapters 1 to 1,110 of ONE PIECE. All chapters from Jump Comics up to Volume 109 have been taken directly from the books and displayed as a continuous scroll on the curved exhibition wall at PLAY! MUSEUM. The display is 3.6 meters high and 140 meters wide. This is a one-of-a-kind experience, a spectacle that even readers who own every single ONE PIECE volume have never witnessed. To create the title logo for the exhibition, typesetting was carried out using antique wooden type owned by the Kazui Press. Designer Idea Oshima selected the letters. The typesetting was done by Masao Takaoka of Kazui Press.

The pirates from ONE PIECE are seen on wanted posters displaying the words “WANTED” and “DEAD OR ALIVE.” Prior to the introduction of phototypesetting, large characters like these were not available in metal type, so skilled craftsmen would carve them into wooden type blocks by hand. The logo design connects ONE PIECE with the history of printing.

The catalog includes a model of the exhibition hall at PLAY! MUSEUM (p. 170), the production process of the wooden type for the logo (p. 174), and the typesetting with wooden type (p. 178).

All of this is to make each book a unique and irreplaceable item for each person—the “only one.” The word “only” highlights a frequent theme: things that only ONE PIECE does, things that only ONE PIECE is able to do, things that can be done only because it’s ONE PIECE. These are things that come to life through the invaluable dedication and efforts of many people.

Shueisha Manga-Art Heritage
https://mangaart.jp/